LA LINEA

by Adriano Aymonino

IVAN BILIBIN AND THE ENCHANTED VISION OF OLD RUSSIA

Italian version below - Versione in italiano sotto

With a territory that could almost include China and the United States of America put together, Russia is by far the largest nation in the world. In the nineteenth century its empire embraced both the frosty Siberian steppe and the deserts of Central Asia and its soil was shared by the nomadic Mongols of Tartary with the Europhile aristocrats of western Russia.
Centuries of invasions, migrations and trades have made the folk art of this immense country, straddling Asia and Europe, an eccentric fusion of extremely different influences. Slavic, Greek, Latin, Indian and Persian elements appear, mixed and revived, in the decorations of the rural churches, in the geometric and animal patterns employed in fabric and in the intricate details of the izbe  the wooden houses of the Russian peasants.
In 1899 Ivan Bilibin, a young student and artist from St Petersburg, embarked on the first of a series of trips in search of the popular art and traditions of Old Russia, gathering on his way all sorts of objects, fabric, prints and decorative elements. In 1903 he visited the Volga region and the Karelia, far away in the remote north. Here he was struck by the lyrical beauty of the medieval wooden churches, by the splendour of the monasteries protected by thick walls washed with white lime.
In these early years of the new century, Bilibin also joined Mir iskusstva (World of Art), the famous group of vanguard artists that proposed a radical transformation of nineteenth-century Russian art, taking their inspiration from contemporary European trends, especially Symbolism and the Art Nouveau.
Bilibin specialised in graphic design, pouring into his art all his love for the motherlands folklore. The most spectacular result of this process was his various celebrated illustrations for a series of medieval Russian fables, published in the first years of the twentieth century. All the diverse facets of popular Russian art, all its themes and symbols, were filtered by Bilibin through the decorative language of Art Nouveau, creating in this way fairytale images which in their turn became part of the national collective imagination.
His illustrations intentionally avoid chiaroscuro, the use of light and shade to create depth. The figures are composed by uniform surfaces of colour, framed by well delineated black lines, as if they were marble inlays or medieval stained-glass. This essential and evocative technique influenced an entire generation of young Russian artists and among them Wassily Kandinsky, whose early, vibrant paintings closely resemble Bilibins style of illustration.
The most famous image, the one that would become a sort of icon of the golden age of Russian illustration, was produced for the Tale of the Tsar Saltan by Aleksandr Pushkin. It is a vision of an enchanted city, in which every element speaks of ancient Russia: the excess of decorative elements, the thick white walls and the golden domes, the fabrics covered with floral patterns, the stylised animals in the lower frame.
After more than two decades spent producing illustrations, posters, set designs and theatrical costumes for the Russian public, in February 1920 Bilibin reached the Black Sea and boarded a ship crowded with political refugees. He was abandoning his beloved land, torn into pieces by the civil war in the aftermath of the October Revolution. He spent the following twenty years in exile, first in Cairo and then in Paris, renouncing illustration almost entirely and devoting himself instead to landscapes and later to set designs for the celebrated Russian operas and ballets in Paris.
Only in 1938 did he return to Russia. He resumed his illustrations but the lyrical vein of his early years was lost forever. Nonetheless, his fame granted him numerous commissions and he once again, as many years before, invented tables for the epic poems of medieval Russia, withdrawing into this mythical past while the world around him was falling to pieces. He died, alongside more than a million of his fellow residents, in the Nazi siege of Leningrad in the winter of 1942, with a handful of drawings for his beloved national tales just outlined on his desk.

1: Head-piece for Bilibins article Folk Arts and Crafts in the North of Russia published in the World of Art journal, 1904
2: And behold! To his amaze A great city met his gaze. Illustration for The Tale of the Tsar Saltan by Pushkin, 1905
3: Title-page for The Tale of the Tsar Saltan by Pushkin, 1905.